


Jailbird

by methdrips (Encre)



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Gen, Healing, Implied/Referenced Torture, Painting, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:35:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25900693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Encre/pseuds/methdrips
Summary: Ten years after the events of Breaking Bad, Marie calls Skyler to tell her of two portraits she saw at a swanky Nob Hill art show; a portrait of Walter White and a portrait of Skyler. The artist is unknown, seemingly on purpose. Desperate for answers, Skyler does her own digging, determined to uncover the identity of this so-called "anonymous artist," Jailbird, and ends up getting much more than she bargained for.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 27





	1. Contessa

**Author's Note:**

> i've literally spent two years writing nine pages what is wrong with me

The sound of her cell phone ringing rouses Skyler from her restless slumber. That shrill noise never fails to shoot an icy bolt of anxiety through Skyler’s heart. Nobody calls this late with good news. She answers, her groggy voice filling the darkness of her bedroom. 

“Hello?”

“Skyler!” Marie harps through the receiver like it’s nine o’clock in the morning. “Skyler, you aren’t going to believe this. I was at an art show -- up in Nob Hill, you know, at Mariposa? The gallery by that Peruvian place? It was really exclusive, so it wouldn’t surprise me if you hadn’t heard about it, but there was this artist featured there and they --” 

“Okay, alright --  _ Marie. _ ” Skyler slurs, far too tired to try and follow along with her sister’s rambling. “Okay, Marie. Slow down. What’s going on? It’s…” Skyler glances at the clock on her bedside table, groaning when she sees the time. “Almost three o’clock in the morning.” 

“Skyler, I swear to God. There was this painting, it -- it must’ve been…  _ ten feet  _ high, and it was  _ you. _ I swear! I was going to call you in the morning, but I… I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It looked  _ exactly like you, _ Skyler. You when you were with… when we… you know, when  _ he _ ...”

Marie sounds positively hysterical. Skyler can practically see her pacing around her kitchen, trying not to spill her glass of expensive prosecco ( _ not champagne, _ as she would be apt to correct) as she waves her arms in grandiose gestures. The information catches Skyler off guard, though -- and for a moment, she’s convinced that it must be a mistake, that Marie is just confused. There’s a few seconds of silence before Skyler speaks again.

“... Have you been drinking?” 

“Skyler, I’m serious! It was you! You and…” Marie lowers her voice like there’s anyone around for miles who can hear her. “You and  _ Walt. _ ” 

There’s something ominous about the way that name still sends chills down Skyler’s spine; how just the mention of that man makes her feel as though he’s breathing down her neck again, laying next to her in the dark and waiting for her to let that mask of quiet obedience slip from her face, waiting for her to snap and gouge his eyes out with her bare hands. Daring her to. To do anything at all to stop him, knowing he has her trapped. Skyler is quiet for a while. “Who would want to paint us?” 

She hears Marie sigh on the other line, hesitation obvious in her voice. “I don’t know, but the piece was called  _ Contessa. _ I must’ve stared at it for an hour. It’s… it’s beautiful. Look it up when you get the chance. I’m not lying, I swear.” 

“Okay, Marie. I’m going to go back to sleep now.” 

“Okay. Goodnight, Skyler. I’m sorry for mentioning, uh… well,  _ him, _ but I just thought you should know--” 

Skyler hangs up the phone and tosses it haphazardly onto the nightstand that used to be Walt’s, devoid of all of his belongings. It’s hollow like bones in the desert. She stares at the layer of dust beginning to collect on its surface, imagining his books stacked there, his alarm clock. It’s impossible to escape his memory, that bittersweet specter, reminding her of near-decades of marriage they shared and the 2 years that tore it all down. It’s hard to imagine that it all happened nearly ten years ago. Everything still feels the same. The wound is still fresh. 

Sometimes, Skyler swears she sees a pair of wire-rimmed glasses sitting there on the nightstand, neatly folded, out of the corner of her eye.

In the morning, she burns her coffee and drinks it anyway, a bitter taste on her tongue. From the hallway in the living room Flynn wanders out into the kitchen with a yawn, and Skyler turns to him, holding her sour coffee and offering him a forced smile that she knows he can see right through. “Morning, sweetie. You want some coffee?” 

He doesn’t look at her, instead making his way to the kitchen table. “Sure, mom.” 

She pours him a cup, her mind wandering so much that she doesn’t notice the hot coffee flowing over the sides of the cup until it begins to drip onto her bare feet on the kitchen floor. She curses under her breath. Skyler’s rinsing her hands off in the sink when she feels a gentle hand on her shoulder, Flynn’s voice low and full of an understanding that she doesn’t feel she deserves. 

“I-I got it, mom. Y-You go and get H-Holly up.” 

Skyler smiles again, but she means it this time, and she sets her hand atop her son’s. For a moment they share a brief look of understanding, of the loss of a man that had once been a father and a husband, a man who died a stranger; they share a trauma that cannot be understood by anyone else on earth. Even through their struggles, through their disagreements, they’re all they have and they know it. Skyler’s hand tightens around Flynn’s. 

“Okay.” she says, and she lets Flynn take too many paper towels from the roll without saying anything. 

The rest of the morning is a blur, waving to Flynn and Holly as they leave for school, Flynn set to drop Holly off at her elementary school before he heads to his first class of the day at UNM. She stands in the doorway, in her dusty pink robe, for a few minutes too long, just in case Holly had forgotten her lunchbox at the kitchen table again. When she’s sure that they won’t be returning she turns and locks herself in her home, heading straight for her laptop in the top drawer of her nightstand. 

She stares at the startup screen for a very long time. Too long, certainly. She has her hand on the mouse, shaking against her will, and the cursor shakes right along with her, hovering over the icon for Google Chrome. Part of her doesn’t want to know. It wants to forget everything, wants to let this stranger with his strange fixations profit off of her misfortune, but another part of her… 

She opens Google Images and types “contessa painting” into the search bar. 

She nearly vomits on her keyboard when she sees her face, eight years younger, staring straight back at her from the screen. Next to her in the results is Walt, his face distorted and dripping with malice the way it used to when he’d look at her from across the dinner table. The lines in his face are exactly where they used to be. There’s no color in the paintings save for the eyes, hers bright and blue and sad, and Walt’s are still blue but dark and sinister, like the bottom of an ocean, staring through her soul even in death. 

There’s no question that these paintings are of Skyler and Walter White. There’s no one else that has ever looked so sinister, so deadly, behind those thick wire-rimmed glasses and that unkempt browline. And Skyler feels that very few other people would know that look. At least, none that are still alive. 

She clicks on _ Contessa _ and it takes her to an online portfolio of hundreds of paintings. Many are dark and profoundly sad, as if emotion itself had been used to prime the canvases. Among the black and white portraits of Skyler and Walter White are hundreds of paintings of a sky, sometimes grey, but mostly dark reds and black, from behind a set of thick black stripes.

The featured painting, greeting the visitor to the home page, is that of a deep, ominous red sky, haphazardly painted like the artist was losing control of himself, cut into slices by thick black strokes, scraped on heavily with a palette knife, making up the bars of a cage. It’s clear that the viewer is meant to be standing inside of the cage looking up at the hinged door, unlocked and open. From between the bars, painted far in the distance, is a single bird flying alone in the bleak red sky, free. 

Beneath the painting, the information is listed: 

Unknown   
_ Jailbird _ , 2011  
Oil on canvas, 2 x 4 feet.   
Anonymous donation.

Skyler reads further on and realizes that this painting is hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, right next to the portrait of Walt, and that her face hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston when it isn’t being shown at a gallery by a Peruvian restaurant in Nob Hill. All of the paintings are done by an anonymous artist. No one is even sure if this is one person, or a few with a very distinct style, all choosing to stay in the shadows. A grand plan. 

Skyler actually laughs out loud at that. So deep into her husband’s meth operation that even now, nearly a decade later, she still thinks every little thing is deliberate. Planned. Made fresh just for her to consume and believe. She reads on, scrolling through the artist’s website.

Some of the paintings are anonymous donations to the museums, while others are purchased by patrons at auctions and then sold to the museums for hefty prices. Tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes millions. Walter’s portrait,  _ Mirage, _ had been bought by the Met for nearly one million dollars. 

Skyler imagines he’d have been insulted by so low a buying price. 

How long had her face been hanging in one of the most famous museums in the world without her knowing? How had this person known what she looked like? 

She supposes it’s possible that they could have seen her in the news, in the paper, pasted there next to Walt beneath headlines like “WIFE ACCOMPLICE TO MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR METH EMPIRE!” and “SKYLER WHITE YET TO COOPERATE WITH POLICE.” 

The thoughts of the trial and her simultaneous fame and isolation makes her shift in her seat, cringing. The trauma of that blame is not lost on her. It never will be. She imagines she must have been featured in hundreds of articles, dozens of news broadcasts. Her face was all over America for months, in a much less flattering fashion. The country hated her. She was the only one left to blame. 

So why had this person painted her visage so tenderly? Why were the strokes of the brush so calm, so clean, so purposeful compared to the jagged, desperate lines of the other paintings? She feels honored in a strange, uncomfortable way. She feels invaded. Looking at her painted face, her cheekbones hollowed and her eyes sunken, the sadness palpable in her expression and in the brushstrokes themselves, makes her mind wander places to which she never allows it. 

Skyler thinks of the last time she’d seen Walt. How haggard and awful he’d looked, his cheekbones hollowed and his shirt yellowed with a week’s worth of sweat. She remembers staring at him through the wafting smoke of her cigarette, heart swollen with sorrow for the man she married, the man she once knew. Who he once was. Who  _ she _ once was. 

And then he’d handed her that creased lottery ticket. 

_ That’s where they’ll find the bodies of Hank and Steve Gomez,  _ he said. 

Skyler slams her laptop shut, bursting into tears and holding her head in her hands. She’s grateful that Flynn and Holly aren’t here -- grateful for the chance to pour out all of the emotion she’s been holding in. She cries for the better part of an hour before she finally collects herself enough to remind herself: she wants answers. Needs answers. There’s someone out there who knows more than the paintings let on, though only the people involved would ever see it that way. 

Besides, who the hell is this stranger to take her face and make millions off of it? 

She begins searching again, typing in things like “anonymous artist heisenberg,” and soon enough she gets a match for a Wikipedia page on someone called the Jailbird. Skyler clicks the link and leans forward, coffee forgotten on the kitchen table next to her. The article lists the Jailbird’s numerous accomplishments, his awards. His infamy. His art hangs in the grand mansions of members of the British royal family, _ he’s in the Met _ , and no one knows who he is? No one has any idea? 

Skyler doesn’t believe that. As a matter of fact, she  _ refuses _ to believe that.

She stares at  _ Jailbird  _ for another few moments before she exits the window and opens Microsoft Word, trying to finish up some chipping away at the memoir that Marie and her “friend who is an editor” keep insisting that she write. Skyler stares at the computer screen as if it’s the thing that’s caused all this chaos, as if it’s this object’s fault that she married a man who was bound to go down in history as one of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers. And, besides, who would want to read the life story of a housewife trapped under the thumb of a meth kingpin, kept in the dark? They’d want to know about Walt. About Jesse Pinkman. They’d want to know information she doesn’t have. Information she doesn’t want to have. 

She sighs heavily through her nose, running her fingers through her hair, pulling it back from her face as if that will somehow help her see the words on her laptop screen any better. The jumbled letters on the screen mock her. Instead of seeing the thirty-thousand words she’s written over the course of the years, all she can see is blank space. It makes her nervous. 

And, anyway, her mind keeps wandering back to those paintings. That website. The wikipedia page. So she saves the five words she’s added to her memoir and switches back to Google, hoping to find some solace within the deeply entangled web that is the internet. 

The website is blank save for the high quality scans of the paintings themselves, pictures of them hanging on their own wall in the Met, protected by red velvet ropes. Skyler doesn’t think she’d be able to stand within two feet of one of these paintings -- they’re too sad, too full of regret and grief and longing. Too much like her. Too much like who she pretends not to be. 

There’s no particularly useful information on the website -- it gives a brief description of each painting, the asking price or the place it’s currently housed, and the _ About The Artist  _ page is a link to a painting of a man whose face has been violently painted over, wild brushstrokes against what seems to be a strong jawline and blue eyes, beneath the chaos of the paint above them. In some places the oil is so thick and the pressure was so great that there are tears in the canvas, sewn back together with red thread. The portrait is called  _ Nobody.  _ It’s not for sale. 

Skyler debates closing her computer again and forgetting the whole thing. Clearly, whoever this is has gone to great lengths to remain anonymous. Even the third and fourth page of the google searches she tries yield little results. All she knows is that they call the artist “The Jailbird.” She finds it strange. But who is she to pass judgment on someone whose torment is so glaringly obvious anyway? Perhaps they didn’t choose the name of their own volition. Maybe it was like the Black Dahlia, where a reporter picked a nickname, printed it, and made it the official title. Who knows? 

Skyler makes herself another cup of coffee, and this time she doesn’t burn it. As she watches the brew drip steadily down into the glass coffee machine, she keeps finding herself drawn back to that laptop. Those stories. Those paintings. There has to be something she’s missing -- something that she knows. 

She returns to her computer, fresh coffee in hand, and returns to the Jailbird’s website. She sorts the paintings in chronological order, from oldest to newest. She spends a little too long looking at every single brush stroke, as if there will be some hidden message there for her, like hundreds of thousands of other people haven’t already tried to decipher The Artist’s identity. Then again, she’d bet her life on the fact that no one else had been painted by him and unknowingly hung in some prestigious museum in Boston. 

His work bears the talent and control of a master, like he’s apprenticed with one of the greats. She imagines the man, with his strong jaw and blue eyes, sitting outside somewhere sunny and grassy, maybe in a meadow, wind softly blowing, the only sound being the leaves on the trees and the blades of grass swaying against his easel. What a happy fantasy she has for a man with such dark, sometimes violent paintings. 

Each one seems to bear some meaning that she can’t understand. All of them are familiar, yet all of them are such separate entities that it’s hard to believe that one artist painted all of them. 

Soon, she notices, there’s a story here. A story she can put together, fragmented, if she just has the paintings in the right order. The first work ever posted was  _ Jailbird, _ earning him his nickname, Skyler supposed -- but from there the paintings tell an almost too-familiar story of abuse and escape. Some of them are views of the night sky from behind those bars, the trapdoor shut and locked, and other times there are paintings of the desert, flat and hot and extending for miles from behind a barbed-wire fence. 

Something seems familiar about it, but she can’t place it. Her palms sweat, her hands begin to shake, and soon she realizes that if she doesn’t get to that bottle of xanax in the medicine cabinet soon, she’ll be having a full-on panic attack. 

Skyler stumbles to the bathroom, takes her meds, and collapses onto the bed, leaving her laptop open and forgotten in the kitchen. For now she just focuses on her breathing -- in and out, in and out. Count the seconds between your breaths. Focus. Focus. 

Suddenly the front door opens and she hears her children call out to her -- “Mom! We’re home!” 

And she’s in the kitchen faster than lightning, robe forgotten on the hook hanging from the back of her bedroom door, and she shuts the laptop. 

“Um, hi,” Flynn tries again, offering a somewhat offended wave with one hand. 

“Hey, sweetie.” Skyler moves in to kiss his cheeks. He avoids her. So she kisses Holly’s cheeks instead. “How was school?” 

“Fine,” Flynn replies, already on the way to his room. 

Little Holly talks about each and every second of her day: which friends she wasn’t friends with anymore, who had the best lip gloss, who’s mom got them an iPhone for their birthday -- followed by a very long and purposeful pause. 

“No.” says Skyler. 

Holly looks down at her lap. At least she tried.

The night goes on rather uneventfully, though she cannot tear her mind off of the story that she’s beginning to put together in her head. Why are those images so familiar to her? She was never actually locked in a cage. 

Wait. 

She opens her laptop again to take another look at  _ Jailbird _ . The bars to the cage… what everyone has been taking as a metaphor might actually be real. She gnaws on her thumbnail, a habit she’s picked up since having to support her two children without any kind of financial compensation. She stares at the canvas for a long time before opening another tab and typing in:  _ Jesse Pinkman Missing.  _

The first article that pops up, from the Albuquerque Journal, shows an image of a hole in the ground with a cage-like grate on top. It must be twenty or thirty feet deep, pure concrete, with blood stains on the ground that matched Pinkman’s DNA. Thousands of people called for his arrest and execution, but just as many seem to believe he’d already paid his price.

The farther she reads into the article, the more she agrees with the latter; two of Pinkman’s molars were found, along with the first joint of his left ring finger. It makes Skyler sick to her stomach. She remembers the man -- no, the boy-- who had come to have dinner with them all those years ago, nursing his cup of water like it was a lifeboat amongst a stormy sea. She wonders what he’s like now. Wonders how those months in an underground prison cell changed him. 

Once she makes this connection, she goes to great lengths to prove herself right, scouring the internet for the tiniest bits of information on Pinkman; an abandoned El Camino on the border of Mexico, wiped of prints, A purchase for penicillin at a drugstore in Montana, extremely blurry security footage of a man, thin and haggard, looking much like Walt’s younger counterpart, approaching a gas tank in a rural Washington town. So where was he really? Mexico? Washington? 

There are a few of posts on message boards like 4chan that share her sentiment -- that it must be Pinkman, and that he must still be alive. After all, they never found his body, but they found the ten in the home -- all shot to death except for one, who was strangled by chains. Chains left at the scene with Pinkman’s DNA on them.

Others disagree, saying that Pinkman must be dead, because Heisenberg would never have let his partner go on living if he had to die for it -- and, frankly, Skyler agrees. She remembers Walt as a hardened man who would do anything to get more money by lying to himself that he’s doing it for the family. Pinkman was nothing more than a pawn to him, or so she thought. She’d always looked down on him, calling him a junkie burnout and never once stopping to think that Walt had picked him because he had the potential to be something great. 

She’s on her third glass of wine when she stumbles upon a Reddit thread: WHO IS JAILBIRD? 

Though it’s one of the least popular threads on the Subreddit, it catalogues the paintings in chronological order; not based on when the artist painted them, but based on the timeline of events compared to the Heisenberg trial. 

Skyler is immediately enthralled. This timeline makes more sense than the one she had been trying to create in her head -- as if someone who painted the way Jailbird did would ever do something in chronological order. 

Everything seems to add up perfectly -- too perfectly. And then, she sees it: a 2013 Painting, called  _ Ortho _ . It depicts two bloody molars against a concrete background, the shadows of a cage draping softly overtop. Not for Sale.

Skyler heads back to the Jailbird’s website and clicks the tab that reads Tickets. The show in Nob Hill is on for one more day. Skyler purchases the ticket without checking to see how much money it is ($75) and very quickly realizes that she has nothing that fits the dress code. Black tie formal. None of her clothes from ten years ago fit her. 

She sighs, exasperated at the very notion of having to call Marie and ask for help, knowing she’ll have to explain the entire situation and that Marie will inevitably want to get involved. Skyler knows that she’ll have to make it clear that she needs to do this alone. She just needs to see the paintings in person -- it’s like they’ve put a spell on her. She’s bewitched. 

She picks up the house phone and dials Marie’s number, hanging off the end of every ring until she finally answers. 

“Marie,” she says, “I’m going to see the show. I need to borrow something to wear.”


	2. Nobody

Blank canvases make him nervous. An endless expanse of white, ten feet by eight feet long, looms over Jailbird, damning him. It seems to taunt him, as if it exists solely to remind him of the emptiness of his own life and his isolation. It needs to be silenced. Reminded of his ferocity and perseverance. Jailbird squeezes a generous amount of Indian Red onto his palette and soon the canvas is just as bloody as his past, and he keeps going and going, filling each and every space with layer after layer of red and black and yellow until the sun peeks through the curtains of his studio and he feels that he’s successfully trapped another one of his demons beneath a thick coat of wet oil paint. 

He drops the palette and his brushes to the floor and carries himself to his bed, covered in paint and exhausted, collapsing onto his mattress like his limbs are filled with concrete. 

Jailbird is going to paint again tomorrow, and the day after that, because it’s the only thing he knows how to do anymore. 

\--

Jesse never thought he’d be caught dead back in Albuquerque ever again. He’d made a point to stay as far away as he possibly could **–** to just remember it in photographs and fuzzy memories. Certainly, part of him has always remained here since he escaped over a decade ago -- it’s the town where he grew up. The town where he’d gone to school. The town where he’d met Walter White. 

There’s just too much history here for him to really handle **–** too much trauma. Too much destruction. He can’t even round a corner without seeing the final resting place of some poor soul. Someone who could have been spared, had they not been swept up in Heisenberg’s awful schemes. Someone that he knew. Someone he loved. 

There are little reminders of his past life everywhere. Graffiti proclaiming  _ ‘Heisenberg is King!’  _ even now, so many years after his death. It makes Jesse sick to his stomach, to witness the twisted legacy that Walter White has left behind. He wonders, briefly, if dealers still dye their meth blue as some sort of fucked up homage to the father of all evil. 

Most of the time, gallery showings are a bore. Jesse only attends them to remind himself what  _ not _ to do with his money. Making millions of dollars off of paintings hasn’t stopped him from wearing the same blue jeans and jacket every single day  **–** hasn’t stopped him from living in a cabin that runs on firewood and doesn’t have internet or cable. Half the reason is because he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself. The other half is because of all the pretentious _ fucks  _ that come to his showings that show him just how awful money makes people act. 

People who wear animal furs and cashmere, who sit in front of a painting and try to dissect every little brush stroke. _ ‘Oh, see, this color represents anger,’ _ and  _ ‘the use of a liner brush to make these thick lines, so interesting,’ _ Like Jesse knows the first fucking thing about the brushes he uses. He got most of them wholesale or from garage sales, barely cleaned them, and mostly, he just uses his hands and a palette knife. 

Even worse are the self-proclaimed art critics who seem to think they know the first fucking  _ thing _ about anything on these canvases. Like they know what the artist ‘felt’ while he painted. He wants to take them all by the shoulders and shake them and shout  _ ‘this painting evokes a feeling of entrapment because I was literally trapped in a cage for six months! It’s not a metaphor!’  _

But of course, he can’t do that. 

So instead, he sits back and eavesdrops until he gets a headache. Everyone is boring. Everyone looks exactly the same. Everyone walks by him and gives him that same dirty look; the look that says “what do you think  _ you’re _ doing here?” 

A few times, he’s even been kicked out of his own showings, at the requests of the honored guests. Of course. Those times, he’s always bumped up the price to outrageous levels -- as if Walter White’s portrait is worth a million dollars. He should have burned it as soon as he finished it, but something about it had haunted him, and he couldn’t even keep it in his studio for longer than an hour before it started whispering sinister things to him. He’s glad it’s as far away from him as it can be. Locked up forever in some museum, always to be gawked at, but never truly respected. 

Albuquerque, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be very different. The world is full of a bunch of the same people, everywhere, and apparently, they all shop at the same store, because they even look the same. The only one standing out is him, and he’d sooner pretend to be illiterate than admit that any of these paintings belong to him. 

He’s not proud of them. They aren’t accomplishments. Each one is a nightmare that he desperately tries to seal beneath oil paint and send off to some far-off corner of the world, never to be seen or touched again. His paintings don’t belong in the Met. They belong in Badger’s great grandma’s attic, where they’d rot and decay and never be touched. 

They aren’t beautiful. They’re terrible. But, he supposes, many people can’t tell the difference. 

That’s the reason why Mr. White’s portrait sold for more than any of his other paintings, and his favorites, the portraits of Jane and Mrs. White, hadn’t sold at all. 

Most of the time, he’s present during his gallery showings, meandering around and seeming very uninterested in the art. Most people assume he’s a janitor or something, which is just fine with him. The less attention is on him, the better. 

He thinks he’s seen the whole crowd, that he’s rounded the place enough times to have seen every face in the gallery, but then he notices a tall blonde woman waving an envelope in the gallery manager’s face. 

Of course, there are plenty of people at every showing who demand to see the artist. People who slip the gallery manager thousands of dollars in cash just to get a glimpse of the homely, scarred up piece of shit that they all seemed to revere so highly  **–** and of course, it never works, because not even the gallery owners know who he is. He doesn’t have an agent, doesn’t contact anyone directly, doesn’t even own a cell phone. 

His first instinct is to laugh at the sheer hubris of the poor woman, but when he takes a closer look... she seems different. Something about her feels familiar, but in a very, very uncomfortable way. She reminds him of home in all the wrong ways. He feels like he knows that blonde hair, that beige sweater, and god  _ damn _ , those legs – Oh. Oh, no. 

_ Fuck. _

That’s Skyler White. 

What is she doing here? Shit, he should have come to yesterday’s showing too -- is she coming back? Or, is this her first time, and he just happens to be unlucky enough to face the wrath of the right hand of a dead god? No. No, that’s ridiculous. There’s no way she knows it’s him, right? No way. No one’s ever been able to make a definitive connection, nothing but a bunch of conjecture, right?  _ Right? _

He listens a little more closely, trying to focus on what she’s saying to the manager. It’s predictably difficult, in a very Skyler fashion -- she’s assertive, but not aggressive. Firm, but level. She doesn’t raise her voice because she doesn’t have to. Jesse can practically see the blood draining from the gallery manager’s face as she continues, 

“... my face in his paintings. Unacceptable. No --  _ no, _ I already know  _ who _ the artist is, I just need you to tell me  _ where  _ he is.”

Jesse feels his heart leap into his throat and he scrambles to his feet, shoving his way through the crowded gallery and ignoring the grunts of protest from assholes who think that a little bit of sawdust will ruin a $3,000 jacket (if you’re gonna spend that much on anything, why buy something that you wear on the outside of everything else and expect it to stay pristine?). 

With some effort, Jesse plants himself between the manager and Skyler herself against all of his better instincts, and he sort of freezes in his tracks when he’s close enough to smell her perfume. Suddenly he feels like he’s sitting at the dinner table again, but this time he has the balls to say something. 

For a few seconds, the two of them just stare at each other. He wonders if she even recognizes him. Wonders if she’s been wishing that he was dead all these years. 

“Um, excuse me ma’am… your, um…” he glances behind him like someone is waiting there. “Your  _ son _ is looking for you, if you’ll just come with me.” 

He waits for a moment, knowing that Skyler White is just as sharp as she used to be, but hoping she’s willing to play along for his sake. 

“... Yes. Thank you.” 

Jesse can barely conceal his sigh of relief, leading Skyler to a much less populated portion of the gallery, next to another portrait of Jane. He stares, mouth agape, for too long before Skyler says something that makes him want to punch himself in the face. 

“Well? What do you want?” 

How can he possibly answer that question? Does he want something from her? Not exactly, he supposes. It’s not like Jesse Pinkman was class valedictorian; he isn’t exactly known as a wordsmith. Not in situations involving Skyler, anyway. 

“Look, um, Mrs. White,” he starts, and suddenly, Skyler’s eyes widen.

She puts a perfectly manicured hand to her lips, and for the first time in his career as an artist, Jesse feels truly underdressed. He can see the recognition in her face, and for some reason, he isn’t happy about it. She doesn’t look happy about it, either. 

Honestly,  part of him had hoped she’d have no idea who he was, that the scars on his scraggly face and the weight he’d put on would be enough to separate him from the old Jesse Pinkman, but it seems that something about him is still a dead giveaway.

“Please,  _ please, _ don’t let on,” he murmurs quietly. “If I get outed here I’ll never see the light of day again.”

Skyler’s face contorts into an expression that Jesse can only describe as frustration. Part of him feels ten years younger again, desperately trying to gain her approval to no avail, not knowing what kind of picture that Mr. White had painted of him -- a _ junkie burnout, _ as Skyler would be apt to describe him. 

“Who’s still looking for you?” 

Jesse scoffs at her, almost dumbfounded. “... Seriously?” 

She stares expectantly, gesturing to him as if he’s not still one of the top 5 of the FBI’s Most Wanted. He laughs, breathless.

“Oh. Right, yeah. Lemme just go ahead and ask around, update my list a bit.” okay, so maybe the sarcasm is the dead giveaway. “I don’t know. I’m assuming, like, everyone. Since…” He looks around warily, lowering his voice. “Y’know, since… _he_ kicked it, I’m the only one left to take the blame. People probably want my fuckin’ head on a stake.” 

“ _ He _ kicked it and left about a dozen dead bodies and only one suspected accomplice behind, which, let me think…” Skyler touches a finger to her chin, voice getting icy now. “–wasn’t  _ you _ . Most people think you’re  _ dead _ and vanished like the rest of the unrecovered bodies.”

Jesse doesn’t respond, but his eyes ice over along with her voice. He levels a hard stare at her, and part of him wants to ask her just  _ why _ it was that everyone suspected that he was dead. Was it the various body parts and bone fragments that he left behind? What about his blood on the concrete? He’d have killed Walter White himself if it meant he could have taken Skyler’s place in all of this, but he knows better than to say anything, so instead he glares. 

There’s a pause before he makes a face, clearly incredulous. “Did you come here to find me? How did you know I was here?” 

“I came because a stranger was painting my family, and  _ me, _ and profiting off of our tragedy.”

Jesse stares at her like she’s just said the dumbest thing he’s ever heard. “ _ Your _ tragedy?” he scoffs. “Look, Mrs. White--”

“It’s Lambert, now.”

“... Right.  _ Lambert. _ Of course. Okay, look, then,  _ Mrs. Lambert _ \-- I get that you lost a lot. I get that you wish I was dead. Okay? I do too. I’m not as stupid as you think I am. I saw the news, I saw you gettin’ crucified out there, and you know what? I felt shitty about it. But I didn’t disappear on purpose the way he did. He  _ sold me _ \-- like… like a fucking used car, he  _ sold me _ . You know what I was doin’ while you were getting interviewed on CNN, gettin’ offers for an autobiography? Huh?” 

Skyler seems to understand what he’s implying without him having to say it outright, and part of him is grateful for that. He doesn’t like to go back to those places in his mind unless he’s near paint and a canvas. Another part of him, though, wants to tell her exactly what happened in that hole in the ground. He wants to pick it up and dip it in his blood and throw it right back in her face. Instead, he takes a shaky breath, clearly upset. 

“ It was _ my _ tragedy, too. I just paint… I paint when I can’t get an image _ out of my head _ . I wasn’t planning on makin’ money off of it, alright? I’ll burn ‘em, if that’s what you want, but I ain’t gonna limit what I’m allowed to make just ‘cause  _ you _ think you’re the only one who went  _ through something.” _

Skyler stares at him, and is surprised to find him staring back, his blue eyes seeming darker, less human. She considers saying that she doesn’t wish he was dead, but she’s not sure if that would be the truth. Things would probably be easier if he was dead. Definitely easier if he hadn’t come back. Because the temptation to turn him in is definitely there. 

If it wasn’t for the obvious scars, she might view him more as Walt’s accomplice than a victim. All he had ever been was Walt’s “partner,” the one whom she blamed for Walt’s inevitable downfall. She had expected to come and find that same boy hiding behind a glass of water -- and instead, she’s found a man with nothing left to hide behind. Suddenly, Jesse’s face falls a little, and some of the light returns to his eyes as if he’d just pulled his own psyche out of a very dark place. 

“… Fuck. I’m – Jesus, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.” 

If Skyler cares about his apology, she doesn’t let on. “Look, Mr, um…”

“Driscoll.” 

“Mr. Driscoll. Paint whatever you want, but I’m not the bad guy here. My face is hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  _ My face _ . And I didn’t know about it. So, forgive me, but I wasn’t just about to sit back and let it happen. You might own that painting, but you don’t own me.” 

“... Is that why you think I painted you? To  _ own _ you?” 

“I don’t know why you painted me. I came here to find out.” 

Jesse scoffs, exasperated.  “Look, I wasn’t even planning on sellin’ ‘em, okay? But people… people wanted to buy them. They liked them, and I gotta eat. I didn’t know it’d get this big. It ain’t _pretty_ to me, alright? Almost everything in here is a fucking nightmare _._ ” 

“Oh, so my face is a nightmare to you, then?” 

“God damn it, I said  _ almost _ everything.” 

Jesse is suddenly acutely aware of eyes on them, and he turns to see a few of the attendees watching the conversation with a little too much vigor. Jesse levels a sharp glare at them and they almost immediately turn away, but Jesse knows better than to keep talking with this many people around. Even the paintings begin to stare at him, and Jane, trapped in the painting behind him, glares down, damning him. He becomes visibly uncomfortable. 

Skyler is the one to suggest a solution. “We should talk somewhere more private. How long do these showings usually last?”

“I dunno. I never stay the whole time.”

“You’re great at planning, aren’t you?”

Jesse stares at her, shaking his head ever so slightly. It takes actual effort to not remark on the similarities between her and Walt. “I’m gonna go have a cigarette. You can come or not, I don’t really care.” 

Without waiting for a response, he pulls his hood over his head and turns away, showing himself out of the gallery. Skyler considers it for a moment, and decides that she didn’t get this far for nothing. She takes her own pack of cigarettes out of her purse and follows him out to the street. 


End file.
